This paper reports on a longitudinal study on the effects of reading-while-listening, reading with textual input enhancement (i.e. underlining), and reading-while-listening plus textual input enhancement on Vietnamese pre-intermediate EFL learners' acquisition of collocations.
This longitudinal study investigated the effects of reading mode on Vietnamese pre-intermediate EFL learners' acquisition of collocations as well as predictors of learning gains. 118 pre-intermediate Vietnamese EFL learners were assigned to either an experimental group or a no treatment control group. The experimental group engaged with three graded readers containing 32 target collocations (16 verb-noun and 16 adjective-noun collocations) in three counterbalanced reading modes: reading-while-listening, reading with textual input enhancement, and reading-while-listening plus textual input enhancement. Half of the collocations were congruent (i.e., they could be literally translated from L1 into L2) while the other half were incongruent. Learning gains were measured at the level of form recall. Mixed effects logistic regression analyses showed that mode of reading had a significant effect on incidental collocation learning. Reading with textual input enhancement and reading-while-listening plus textual input enhancement led to significantly more incidental collocation learning than reading-while-listening. However, reading with textual input enhancement did not differ significantly from reading-while-listening plus textual input enhancement. In addition, learners' prior vocabulary knowledge and collocational congruency significantly affected learning.
